Private Eye Lettuce

By Richard Brautigan 1935–1984 Richard Brautigan

Three crates of Private Eye Lettuce,

the name and drawing of a detective

with magnifying glass on the sides

of the crates of lettuce,

form a great cross in man’s imagination

and his desire to name

the objects of this world.

I think I’ll call this place Golgotha

and have some salad for dinner.

Richard Brautigan, “Private Eye Lettuce” from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster. Copyright © 1968 by Richard Brautigan. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Source: The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968)

Biography

Terence Malley observed in his Richard Brautigan: Writers for the Seventies, "In general, people who write or talk about Brautigan tend to be either snidely patronizing or vacuously adoring." Certainly Brautigan's work, perhaps due in part to his association with West Coast youth movements, generated a multitude of critical comment. Robert Novak wrote in Dictionary of Literary Biography that "Brautigan is commonly seen as the . . .

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